Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The 0% Faustian Bargain

Ponzi schemes don't so much unwind, as explode. There's no such thing as "free money", only an Idiocracy believes in such a thing. The bill comes at the end of the vacation from reality, which is bought and paid for not with interest, with principal...

Bitcoin is going full Icarus. The narrative of the day is that price measures how wrong skeptics have been to date. Unfortunately, price is a measure of how much money is going to vanish into thin air. 



There will be a lot of "acrimonious" debate when this all ends. Wandering in the desert wondering what the fuck happened? Which clowns can we trust now?


Go figure. 0% poverty capital turned globalization into a momentum con job. Since there was no income nor yield due to outsourced demand, capital was forced to cannibalize itself to create an illusory "income stream". In the context of the vaunted short volatility trade, it comes in the form of elevating one's own asset values toward infinity, while pretending that volatility compression can go on indefinitely. The fantasy of covering half the distance to the wall with each step, while never actually touching the wall. But then comes reality: margin balances max out. Momentum reverses. The butterfly flaps its wings, and next thing you know there's no one else on the other side of the trade. Textbooks don't cover tequila on the linoleum and angry spouses wondering why the college fund is in Bitcoin. 

Eventually the compressed animal spirits bolt out of the barn, inconveniently expanding the trading range. The entire charade is ruined.  



Where? Junk bonds. Oil. Muni bonds. Netflix. Amazon. Bitcoins. Semiconductors. Junk IPOs. Chinese Tech. Vancouver crack shacks.

Everywhere 0% is accepted.  

The delusion that Central Banks can control their frankenmonster is a first order fantasy. They already lost control on the way up, so they sure as hell are not going to have any control on the way down. To be sure, China will try to fiddle fuck around with their casino. They outright banned selling in 2015. In the event, the Shanghai Composite only lost 60%. Something about no one wanting to buy stocks that can be halted for weeks at a time. The law of unintended boneheads.   

Skynet trades globally on millisecond boundaries. It doesn't wait six weeks for the next meeting of the League Of Extraordinary Money Printers.